NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR WEBSITE

Your customers couldn’t care less about your new look, your newdesign or whether your dog has just had kittens.

“Hi Gerry,” the Air New Zealand marketing email started off. Iremember many years ago when I was a young employee at a companythat had just bought its first computer. We got this wordprocessor with an amazing feature called mail merge. We couldnow send lots of automated individual letters to people who owedus money. The letters went something like this:

We sat around and marvelled at the ability to produce so manyletters automatically and how people would feel that they werereceiving individually penned missives. Those letters worked sowell.

I don’t think it works quite as well today. When I receive anautomated marketing email addressing me by my first name, Idon’t go weak at the knees: “Oh, the software knows my firstname! It knows my name!” Has anyone tested to see whether theseso-called personalization techniques are more likely to alienatea customer than impress them?

Anyway, back to the Air New Zealand marketing email that I don’tremember signing up to. (I’ve had pretty good experiences flyingwith Air New Zealand by the way.) “Welcome to the second editionof our new look monthly email.” Two fatal mistakes in the firstsentence. Welcome? Hello? What’s with the welcome? I don’t wantyour welcome. If I want anything from you it’s your deals, andhot deals at that. When you think of your customer, imagine TonySoprano. Nothing personal, just business. Cut the crap. Getstraight to the point.

So Air New Zealand has got a new look monthly email! Stop thepresses!!! Has anyone phoned CNN? This is big news. A new lookmonthly email! Release the press releases! What a story. I can’twait to tell all my friends.“Lads, lads, listen. Have I got news for you.”“What?”“You won’t believe it.”“Come on, tell us.”“You won’t believe it.”“Come on, come on.”“Air New Zealand has a new look monthly email.”“You’re not serious!”“I am.”“You’re joking.”“Never been more serious in my life.”“Nah, you’re joking.”

News like that makes our day. It really does. And you’d beamazed at the amount of websites that want to give you this sortof hard news. Why, I was at the Starwood Preferred Guest websiterecently wanting to check what they offered in Athens when I wasconfronted with content that told me that the site was“redesigned and ready to help you plan your adventures. Take afew minutes to customize your account profile to ensure you takeadvantage of all that our new site has to offer.”

And you know what, I didn’t take those few minutes. That soundedlike a real pain to me. I just wanted to quickly checkavailability and see if there were any good deals. I had zerointerest in designs, redesigns, bee-designs, knee-designs orwe-designs. (Which are what most redesigns really are; done morebecause of internal egos than because of external needs.)

I just wanted the website to work. How thoughtless, cruel anduncaring of me. But then I’m only a customer.